Thursday

Unsurprisingly, I wake up with a huge unbelievable bastard hangover. Drinking that much, that quickly, on a schoolnight, with co-workers, is just not particularly clever. K is unimpressed and rightly unsympathetic, especially when I tell her all the same things I told her when I got home and interrupted the TV program she was watching. She leaves for work and I am unable to do much other than sit staring at the clock, waiting for my turn to leave the house too.

A couple of years ago, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, my colleague Jess and I - under extreme pressure to perform professionally in a stuffy, overlit exhibition hall the morning after an extremely heavy session of hotel-bar schmoozing with various publishing types - decided that we wouldn't moan, or complain, or even acknowledge the fact that we had hangovers. It was, in the event, rather a good coping mechanism in that we wouldn't let each other admit defeat and collapse onto a table or other such surface - and it became known as The Frankfurt Method. It is this method I plan to employ at work today, hopefully managing to actually get some work done through The Fog.

As it happens, the day is predictably horrible but does, as these things do, eventually end. Unfortunately I have another book launch to attend straight after work, which involves getting the tube to Russell Square and walking to the Cartoon Museum. It's a nice evening and the walk through this rather glamorous and leafy part of the city makes me feel better - but as soon as I have a glass of red wine I feel fairly profoundly ill and decide to make my escape, unnoticed. At least I said hello to all the appropriate people. I think. Never again? Probably not, eh?